What is a d-chord on the piano?

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean. Chord notation is sometimes irritatingly inconsistent. In this case, what's at issue is whether your choice of lower-case for the 'd' was intentional or not. There is one school of thought that uses upper-case letters for major chords and lower-case letters for minor chords. So a d chord, within that system, would mean a D minor chord. More usual, though, is the system that says that, if you mean minor, you add an 'm' after the root letter, so that "D" or "d" would mean d major, and "Dm" (or "dm") would mean d minor. It is still more usual to use a capital letter for the tonic note there, though ("D" instead of "d"). So, long story short, I'm not sure if you're asking for a D major chord or a D minor chord. But I suspect you mean D major, because it is most common to simply say a "D" chord when you mean D major, and explicitly say "minor" when you mean minor. The difference is in the third, in this case the F. In a D major chord, the F would be sharp, so it would be an F#. In a D minor, it would be F natural (just a regular, plain F). I'd have to go into a lot of Music Theory to explain why. (For instance, in a C minor, the E is flat, while in a C major, it is natural). But all of that is general music theory, it has nothing specific to do with the piano. In all music, on any instrument, or no instrument at all, a D chord is D-F#-A, and a Dm chord is D-F-A. To translate it specifically to piano, it's just a matter of knowing where those notes *are* on the piano. So let's find them: On the piano, you have a whole bunch of white keys, broken up by a repeating pattern of black keys: two black, then three black. The D note is the white key right between the two black. The F# is the first one of the set of three black. The A is the white key between the last two of the three black. Press those three keys simultaneously, and you are playing a D chord. If you want a Dm chord, then it's, again, the D as the white between the two-black, and now the F, which is the white key just to the left of the three-black, and again the A as the white between the last two of the three-black. If you're doing it right, the D chord will sound brighter, happier, sunnier, and the Dm chord will sound sadder, heavier, or angrier. It was Nigel Tufnel (of the band Spinal Tap) who said that D minor is the saddest key. Hope that helps!